Rack Magazine

He Couldn’t NOT Look, Right?

He Couldn’t NOT Look, Right?

By Mike Handley

Cows on the lam lead man to bull of the woods.

Nicholas Johnson of Coleman, Oklahoma, hadn’t planned to hunt the opening day of the 2012 rifle season, a Saturday, because he’d scheduled the next nine days off from the casino where he works.

Still, the 34-year-old didn’t gain any sleep that morning.

“That Friday night, Nov. 16, a neighbor called and said my cows were over there, but not to worry about it; they’d be fine,” Nick said. “I didn’t plan on it, but I woke up early the next morning, started worrying about them, and decided to go see where they were.

“I found some of the cows, and then I went over to my place to see if the others were there,” he continued. “They were.”

Before returning home, Nick took a pit stop near his barn. On the way back to his truck, he paused just long enough to look down a fence line toward 15 acres of bottomland. The barn sits on a hill, and a barbed wire fence runs downhill about 300 yards toward a creek.

“I just thought I’d check, you know? It hadn’t been daylight an hour at that point. It’s a big open bottom with a few pecan trees, some brush and a lot of switch cane,” he said.

Nick saw a deer about 200 yards distant and decided its size merited a more discerning look. After retrieving his binoculars from the truck, he was able to confirm it was a small buck.

But he also noticed another, bigger deer.

“I thought What’s on that one’s head? That don’t look right,” he said. There was no mistaking antlers, though, so he went back to his truck to get his beloved .25-06.

“I went into full hunt mode then,” he said.

“I knew I needed to get closer, so I eased on down about 70 or 80 yards. When I glanced back at the buck, I thought Man, that’s a NICE deer. That’s a shooter!

“I probably watched it for about 15 minutes,” Nick said. “It took that long for the buck to travel maybe 20 yards. It was so cautious and moving so slowly. It was really alert.”

After squeezing the trigger, Nick lost sight of the buck for a second or two.

“It was a real cold morning. I mean, the ground was just white with frost. When I shot, the gas in that gun came out, and I couldn’t see anything. When I rose up, I saw a flag take off and thought Man, I missed that deer!

Ever the responsible hunter, he went to make sure.

“When I got down there, I could smell the buck before I saw it. It stunk bad,” he said, referring to its urine-stained tarsal glands.

“My buddy, Mike, hung the deer for me. We celebrated that night and for the rest of the year!” he smiled.

Nick had no idea a buck of that caliber lived on the family farm. When he checked his trail camera two weeks later, he was surprised to find the first and last nighttime photographs of the distinctive whitetail.

“After I killed him, I didn’t do any more hunting,” he said. “I decided I might as well pull (my only) trail camera. When I was going through the images, there were two pictures of that buck on there.”

Most of the deer shot around that corner of Atoka County are pretty clean Typicals. Nick can think of only one with substantial irregular growth, and that one was harvested 5 or 6 miles north of where he lives and hunts.

He believes an earlier injury might have spurred his deer’s strange antler growth.

“The buck had a place on its hip where a big part of the muscle was gone. It was all healed up, like maybe it was something that happened when he was a fawn,” Nick said. “A big chunk of meat was gone. Looked as if it had been like that for years.”

Nick still has the deer’s teeth, but nobody has officially aged it. Based on the buck’s body and antler mass, he thinks it was 5 1/2 years old.

This article was published in the October 2016 edition of Rack Magazine. Subscribe today to have Rack Magazine delivered to your home.

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